Four Portals to One
Consolidating Goldman Sachs' fragmented adviser experience into a personalized, evergreen dashboard.
Impact at a Glance
Surfaces consolidated
to
Public marketing site, adviser portal, GSIU, and private placement microsites collapsed into one personalized dashboard.
mvp scope
deliverables
From dashboard architecture to a hybrid search experience to design system reconciliation.
pattern adoption
Post-mvp
Dashboard search pattern triggered a net new redesign of public-site global search.
Status as of May 2026. UAC is the flagship strategic initiative for AWM Digital Product, with MVP in active QA and a post-MVP roadmap already underway.
00 – about my role
I lead UX design for the Unified Adviser Center, AWM's flagship platform consolidation initiative. About a quarter of the work is clean design system pickup. The remaining three quarters is reconciling existing patterns for a fundamentally different user context, making architecture calls on data sourcing and component ownership between One GS and AWM, and doing technical discovery with engineering before product can write requirements.
I partner with leadership, product, front-end engineering, and the enterprise design system team. User research is running in parallel, with regional director interviews underway and adviser interviews pending green light.
On a dashboard like this, most of the design decisions aren't design decisions. They're technical architecture decisions made under a design question.
skills
UX Strategy
Information Architecture
Design Systems
Technical Discovery
Cross-Functional Leadership
Role
Lead UX Designer
Individual Contributor
client
Asset & Wealth Management
timeline
Q4 2025 through Q2 2026 MVP
Evergreen post-MVP
01 – Situation
An adviser experience split across four siloed surfaces with no continuity.
Goldman Sachs Asset & Wealth Management serves institutional clients and financial advisers across four disconnected digital surfaces: am.gs.com (the public marketing site), the adviser portal (account management and tooling), GSIU (gated education and CE credits), and private placement microsites (alternatives content). Manual entitlement creates friction at every handoff. There's no continuity between surfaces, no unified personalization, and no consistent way to track engagement back to commercial outcomes.
Key Problems
The strategic problem isn't that any single portal underperforms. It's that the experience itself is fragmented. Advisers move between surfaces to do related work, log in separately, and lose context each time. The firm has no way to deliver a personalized experience or measure platform engagement at the adviser level. Education sits behind one wall, account tooling behind another, and product information lives somewhere else entirely.
Constraints
Hard ship date.
Mid-June 2026 for MVP. Date set by leadership and not moving.
Design system in flux.
The marketing site shipped with agency-era overrides on top of the One GS enterprise design system. Engineering's posture has shifted to a no-overrides policy, which surfaces deltas between Figma documentation, the out-of-the-box toolkit, and what's currently in production.
Build interpretation gaps.
The team leans heavily on the design system for assembly, but build often diverges from handoff. Detailed back-and-forth on spacing, density, and component composition is the norm.
Cross-stream dependencies.
UAC sits at the intersection of GSIU content migration, alternatives access and attestation, and the broader marketing site. Each has its own timeline and its own decision-makers.
02 – objective
A unified adviser experience, built MVP first, designed to iterate continuously.
Consolidate the fragmented surfaces into a single intelligent platform with a personalized dashboard, then operate the program as evergreen so post-MVP iteration replaces a one-time launch model.
For Users
Four portals down to one. Tailored to who you are.
One destination instead of four. A personalized hero with funds, products, and offerings tailored to the logged-in adviser. Search, education, tools, and subscription utilities accessible without portal-hopping.
For the Business
Build the platform. Ship the roadmap.
A consolidated platform that supports retention, cross-sell, and lead generation. A foundation for personalization that previously had no home. A research-backed roadmap that points to what to lean into next.
03 – actions
Eight MVP deliverables, four worth telling the story behind.
The MVP dashboard architecture is straightforward on the surface: header and navigation, a personalized hero with embedded search, a featured tool, an educational resources section, and a right-rail utility panel. Underneath, the work split into eight deliverables, each with its own technical and architectural decisions. Four are worth pulling out because they show where the role pushes past execution into product, engineering, and architecture decisions.
Deliverable #1
Hero Search Experience
Search is the hardest deliverable in the MVP, by a wide margin. The dashboard search reconciles two existing but fundamentally different paradigms inside the firm. Fund finder is filter-based: results narrow as users type, with nested share class and performance data inline. Global search runs on Algolia: string-based matching across funds, insights, offerings, and documents.
The dashboard needed something neither pattern could deliver alone. A focused search across funds and offerings only, surfaced inline in the hero, with a dropdown that returns results without leaving the dashboard.
I worked with engineering to discover what was technically feasible before product wrote requirements. The indexing approach, scoping the dashboard search to funds and offerings only, came out of those conversations. That informed the design direction and unblocked product to write accurate user stories. The dropdown shell comes from the One GS enterprise design system, but the content inside it (fund tickers, asset classes, offering strings) is AWM-specific. The result is a true hybrid component with split ownership, which I documented for engineering handoff.
Pattern adoption beyond UAC.
Leadership saw the dashboard search and asked the obvious question: why isn't this the global site search experience on am.gs.com? Fair point. It triggered a net new, post-MVP work stream to redesign public-site global search aligned to the dashboard pattern. The catch is scope: dashboard search is product-focused, while global search has to cover documents, insights, funds, offerings, and miscellaneous content. Reconciling the dashboard's focused experience with the breadth global search has to support is the design problem to solve next.
Deliverable #2
The Hero Fund and Product Cards
I redesigned the information hierarchy for that context. An eyebrow surfaces asset class (mapped to the public site taxonomy for scannability). NAV sizing reduced to free up visual real estate. A new utility bar gives in-context access to fact sheets, prospectuses, and monthly fact cards, which previously required a multi-step retrieval path: card click, fund detail page, documents section, sift, download. The utility bar collapses that into one click. It's a UX efficiency play, not decoration.
Three card variants live together as one visual family in the carousel: equities and fixed income funds, a money market variant that displays both NAV and yield, and a net-new private placement card with eyebrow, title, description, and a "View product details" CTA. Private placements aren't accessible on the public site. Surfacing them in the dashboard is part of the value proposition of authenticated access.
Beyond the design itself, I authored technical implementation notes specifying which card elements pull dynamically from page properties versus authored content, where eyebrow taxonomy should be sourced from, and how component ownership splits between One GS and AWM. The cards are designed and walked through with engineering. Build is in flight.
Deliverable #3
Navigation and Header Overflow
Adding a "My Dashboard" entry point to the existing am.gs.com header sounds like a single-day deliverable. It surfaced a design system edge case. The new nav item pushed total items past the responsive threshold, so items started getting hidden at smaller breakpoints.
I explored a hamburger pattern (rejected, breaks the desktop affordance), a font size reduction (didn't solve the underlying problem), and a three-dot "show more" overflow pattern. The team aligned on the overflow pattern. Rather than build something custom, I'm sourcing it from the enterprise design system, which means coordinating with the central design team to ensure AWM's implementation stays compliant with the broader system.
The deliverable is small. The pattern itself is durable: every downstream initiative that adds to the header inherits a solved problem instead of solving it again.
Deliverable #4
The User Profile Dropdown
Designing the user profile dropdown looked like a UI ask. It was actually a navigation architecture question.
The public login button does two jobs at once: authentication entry point and portal directory. Once a user logs in, the directory disappears, which means logged-in users lose navigation capability that logged-out users have. That's an IA problem dressed up as a UI problem.
The MVP solution is a hybrid. The login button becomes an account dropdown showing the user's initials, containing logout plus an "Access Portals" link that opens the existing portal directory. It preserves all portal access, keeps engineering lift minimal, avoids overloading the account menu with adviser destinations, and, most importantly, doesn't lock in a long-term IA decision about whether the dashboard is a hub or a destination. That call still has to be made post-MVP. The MVP solution keeps the door open without forcing it.
04 – Results
MVP in QA. Designs delivered. Strategy validated. Numbers come post-launch.
The MVP isn't shipped yet, so the headline metrics will land post-launch. Designs are delivered, the build is in flight, the strategic frame has held up, and the work has already triggered a post-MVP work stream that wasn't on the original roadmap. Tracking will focus on adviser engagement, dashboard return visits, and the share of cross-portal tasks completed inside the unified surface.
By the numbers
Surfaces consolidated
4
to
1
Public marketing site, adviser portal, GSIU, and private placement microsites collapsed into one dashboard.
MVP deliverables
8
Spanning navigation, personalized hero, hybrid search, fund and product cards, tooling, education, subscription state, and user profile.
Designs delivered
All
8
Handed off to engineering by end of March 2026 to hit the mid-June ship.
Active QA workstreams
2
Search experience as the highest-effort thread, plus override reconciliation across Figma, toolkit, and production.
Pattern adoption
Post-MVP
work stream
Dashboard search pattern adopted as the model for a public-site global search redesign.
Operating mode
Evergreen
Continuous iteration replaces a one-time launch model. New permanent work stream for AWM design.
Key Outcomes
Strategic frame held.
UAC is consolidating four surfaces into one with a clear MVP and a post-MVP roadmap that's already populated. The work isn't a feature build, it's a platform bet, and leadership is treating it that way.
Cross-functional model that scales.
Product writes accurate requirements because design unblocks them through technical discovery. Engineering picks up the design system where it can, and inherits documented split-ownership components where it can't. The pattern is repeatable.
Evergreen as the operating mode.
Post-MVP iteration replaces the ship-and-move-on model that has historically defined campaign work at AWM. Research is now running in parallel with build, with regional director interviews underway and adviser interviews pending green light.
Pattern adoption beyond UAC.
The dashboard search redesign triggered a net new global search work stream, design-led, that will reshape the public-site experience well beyond UAC scope.